To-day I read in the “paper from home” that Private William Keel is “missing, believed killed”; and it took me back to the old days before the war when the late Private Keel was accustomed to hold up the little town.  Mr. Keel was a sober man—­except upon occasions.  The occasions were not numerous, but they left an undying impression on his neighbors and fellow townsmen; for the late private had a way all his own.  He was a big Welshman, so strong that he never knew how strong he was; and when he became obsessed with the desire to get drunk, no one could stop him.  He had to have it out.  At such times his one ambition was to ride a horse up the steps of the hotel, and then—­George Washington-like—­rise in his stirrups and deliver an impassioned address on what we owe to the Old Flag.  If he were blocked or thwarted in this, he became dangerous and hard to manage, and sometimes it took a dozen men to remove him to the Police Station.  When he found himself safely landed there, with a locked door and small, barred window between himself and liberty, his mood changed and the remainder of the night was spent in song, mostly of “A life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling deep”; for he had been a sailor before he came land-seeking to western Canada.

After having “proved up” his land in southern Manitoba—­the Wanderlust seized him and he went to South America, where no doubt he enlivened the proceedings for the natives, as he had for us while he lived among us.

Six weeks after the declaration of war he came back—­a grizzled man of forty; he had sold out everything, sent his wife to England, and had come to enlist with the local regiment.  Evidently his speech about what we owe to the Old Flag had been a piece of real eloquence, and Bill himself was the proof.

He enlisted with the boys from home as a private, and on the marches he towered above them—­the tallest man in the regiment.  No man was more obedient or trustworthy.  He cheered and admonished the younger men, when long marches in the hot sun, with heavy accouterments, made them quarrelsome and full of complaints.  “It’s all for the Old Flag, boys,” he told them.

To-day I read that he is “missing, believed killed”; and I have the feeling, which I know is in the heart of many who read his name, that we did not realize the heroism of the big fellow in the old days of peace.  It took a war to show us how heroic our people are.

Not all the heroes are war-heroes either.  The slow-grinding, searching tests of peace have found out some truly great ones among our people and have transmuted their common clay into pure gold.

It is much more heartening to tell of the woman who went right rather than of her who went wrong, and for that reason I gladly set down here the story of one of these.

Mrs. Elizabeth Tweed is the wife of Private William Tweed—­small, dark-eyed, and pretty, with a certain childishness of face which makes her rouged cheeks and blackened eyebrows seem pathetically, innocently wicked.